Hello guys! Welcome back to Not Just Mecha, it s Marco here and today I ll drastically
improve your colour mixing life with a quick tool tip!
This little gem was hidden in the length of an upcoming step by step but I feel that it
s so cool and so useful for our everyday kind of painting to deserve its own little monographic
video. So, how many times have you been told not
to add pure white in your mixes to avoid desaturation, loss of vibrancy and chalky tones? Or even
not to use white at all! That s not completely wrong because white
is in fact an incredibly dominant pigment and mostly a very opaque kind of paint but,
the truth is that white is a big part of colour theory, colour mixing and of how we can bring
tones to higher values and that, less known, not all whites are created the same.
Check this out! For the sake of the experiment I m using Kimera
colours as my chromatic bases, so single pigment, highly saturated starting points that can
better show the impact of white by itself. Do the same with any other mysterious hobby
paint formula and the effect will be exponentially more powerful because they often start with
a bunch of cheap white inside, that obviously adds all its properties to the final mixtures.
Same starting point, same quantities of paint involved but extremely different results in
terms of interference, saturation, vibrance and general feel of the colours, both visual
and on the brush. Sadly the camera cannot fully catch this aspect,
that's more a "consistency thing" and it s way more visible in person but the third row
is also less chalky and I would say less gritty, but I think you can get a bit of the idea
of this difference by checking the dry pools of paint.
So what s happening here? Well their different tinting strength and opacity are the key to
these interesting gaps of behaviour. Kimera white, aka a good classic Titanium
White, as in most ranges of hobby paints, aims to maximum opacity and tinting power
so it massively lightens, pastelizes and mutes the original tones, even in small quantities,
because again, it s a powerful dominant pigment coming with the full strength of all its features.
Golden Titanium White, used as a general stand-in for the art store version of acrylic Titanium
White, shares a similar extreme tinting and staining strength but it s not fully opaque
making its impact less powerful and less dominant in the mix so easier to manage on the palette
and inside a blend especially in our micro quantities of paint where the impact of a
tiny droplet on the tip of the brush can be massive. By the way, how cool is to have all
this information on every single tube? The last white brightens the base hues, maintaining
most of the original vibrance and saturation even in the second less concentrated pools,
making it extremely good for a subtle tinting of the colours and simple short value jumps
in the same slice of the colour wheel without the need of introducing any chromatic difference
to retain or fix the saturation, aka making the exact same tone just lighter. For these
reasons it s also great for a finer, less invasive control of more complex mixes of
multiple tones and going in a totally different direction it's amazing by itself for glazes
and transparency effects, like for example for subtle glows and soft bouncing light on
non metallic metal, because it's way less chalky and powdery and easier to apply in
translucent layers. Not to mention the possibilities for white
on white transitions or black and white like when working on a value sketch or a proper
grisaille or all the cool stuff we can do with the airbrush with naturally transparent
whites! Ok I kept you on your toes more than enough
Here is the mysterious white that in reality is two tubes of paint. I used Winsor & Newton
Mixing White in the first two examples and Schmincke Zinc White in the last two and I
didn t point out the thing because after a few weeks of experiments I didn t find any
huge meaningful difference between the two. They are technically based on two different
pigments, Pigment White 4 and Pigment White 6 that s the Titanium White family, Schmincke
went with a more classic academic name and Winsor & Newton for a gimmicky, self explanatory
title but personally I cannot perceive any massive variation in their behaviour.
And again the key property is their lower level of opacity! Semi opaque here and semi
transparent on Zinc White that, especially true for PW4, combined with a less staining
pigment gives you whites that are more user friendly and with a finer control on all their
inherent attributes that are still all here but with a more gentle, manageable impact.
I hope this could be useful for your work as much as it's being useful for me at this
precise moment and if you need more examples and applications, don't worry, this stuff
will be in all my future videos, that s exactly why I felt the need to create a reference
for this topic! If you liked this video, give it a like and
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guys!